ProjectVRM Blog

In Vendor relationship management: CRM threat or opportunity?, Graham Saad lays out the customer and vendor side advantages of VRM.

John Cass adds to Francine Hardaway’s report on the talk I gave yesterday at There’s a New Conversation. Note my comment in response to Francine’s post as well.

In My Request to Give, Bart Stevens asks about a relbutton scenario:

It could look something like this:

“… I have 2 laptops and 100 USD which I would like to give to a school in Africa …”
Now this is communicated to the smaller NGO’s which now will have “to compete” for these goods.

By doing so, they (the NGO) start to create a new (and hopefully) a more sustainable relationship with the donor.

What do you think, would this idea fly, or is the NGO community to closed, or not ready yet?
And do you know some NGO’s I could contact to discuss the nuts and bolts of such a platform?

Let me know. I want to see such a platform work.

There is a (hopefully) productive back-and-forth between Simon Edhouse, myself and others in response to this post here. For context read Simon’s The Media is the Mess, where he locates a central problem of silos (such as Facebook) in the legacy client-server architecture of the Web, and commercial modeling that has become so deeply associated with The Web that its polycentral model has become normative, and at odds with the Net’s peer-to-peer roots and nature. I believe Simon mischaracterizes VRM as something operating within that model (or typical of it), but I like many of his thoughts about the model itself. As Adriana points out in her analysis of  ‘user-driven’ vs. ‘user-centric’, there are risky mentalities and framings at play, often when we don’t know it.

In If I Ruled the Internet, Molly Metzger correctly calls for poetry as well as code, if we are to make clear what VRM is all about. I have a comment below her post.

In ProjectVRM we’ve been talking for some time about equipping users with tools for both independence and engagement. In a detailed paper titled Mine! as VRM Infrastructure,  Adriana Lukas has given a name to at least one toolbox: Mine!

I like it.

It begins,

This paper sets out to describe a version of infrastructure or foundation for VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) based on an alternative view on sharing information online between individuals and of online identity. It sets out to explain the strategy and tactics for design, development and adoption of tools - the Mine! and FeedMe (see glossary) - and creation of an infrastructure for other solutions - VRM (relationships with individuals and vendors, transactions), self-defined identity, authentication, data portability and hopefully many more. The aim is to equip individuals with tools to take charge of their data (content, relationships, transactions, knowledge), arrange (analyse, manipulate, combine, mash-up) them according to their needs and preferences and share them on their own terms whilst connected and networked on the web.

With regard to technical aspects, the goals of this paper are, again, to:

1. invent as little as possible
2. reuse only popular technologies, techniques and user-interface metaphors in order to enable VRM, and…
3. provide maximal inclusiveness and extensibility to the Mine! implementation, to permit the greatest potential for growth.

This is very consistent with what Andre Durand started saying back around the turn of the millennium, and what I said in my closing keynote at Digital ID World (DIDW) in 2003.

We are finally there.

Check out Eve Maler in Pushing String on…

• Everyday identity and human-centered design
• Imperatives driving human-centered identity
• Practical human-centering and VRM
• The care and feeding of online relationships

… which appeared in that order. I love the graphics too. One sample:

Another:

Great fodder for discussion at IIW this week.

Alec Muffett and Adriana Lukas have been at work on “Feeds-based VRM”, which they call A Web-Centric Approach to VRM Implementation. I like the goals:

1. invent as little as possible
2. reuse only popular technologies, techniques and user-interface metaphors in order to enable VRM, and…
3. provide maximal inclusiveness and extensibility to the VRM implementation, to permit the greatest potential for growth.

Check it out and see what you think.

In Two tales of user-centricities, Adriana Lukas gets at something that has bothered me for years about the term “user-centric”. It always seemed too external to me. It equates too easily with terms like “customer-focused”. It’s something one does for a user. Not something a user does.

In the past I’ve tried to steer the identity development community away from it, suggesting terms like “independent” instead of “user-centric”. But I failed and just accepted “user-centric” as is. Hell, I don’t like the term “user”, either.

But I think Adriana is right about “-driven”. It’s a much better term. I don’t know if it’s too late to get the identity community to adopt it, but we’re still getting started with VRM. Regardless of what adjectival phrases we use to describe what VRM is about, it’s essential to get our vectors right.

With VRM, our vectors are anchored on the user side, the customer side, the individual’s side. The relationships we establish and manage are on our terms and not just those of vendors. We are not against vendors in the least, of course. Our logic is AND, not OR. But it starts with the sovereign autonomy and independence of each individual as a fully-empowered participant in the relationships that comprise markets and other social arrangements. “-driven” says that much more clearly and correctly than “-centric”.

Same goes for the identity development efforts I’m most familiar with. The difference is that they’re downstream with their vocabularies and we’re not.

For the identity folks, I’d like to see a session at IIW (and discussion in any case) about concepts and vocabularies. Because when I look at this goal of Identity Commons …

To support, facilitate, and promote the creation of an open identity layer for the Internet, one that maximizes control, convenience, and privacy for the individual while encouraging the development of healthy, interoperable communities.

… I see “-driven” rather than “-centric”.

So hey, maybe it’s not too late. The Identity Thing is still pretty young, too.

Another problematic noun in the identity lexicon is “provider”. Here OpenID talks about “identity providers” both as servers the user operates and as something you get from other entities. Specifically,

OpenID allows anyone who can run a web server to run an identity server. Your identity server is separate from your identity, so you are free to use any identity server that has some ability to validate your identity and you can change between them at will. An identity server is sometimes referred to as an identity provider. If you wish, you can use the services listed below with your own website as your identifier using delegation…

The following sites provide OpenID identities and servers to verify them.

People want to feel, to know, that they are in charge of their own identities, and how those identities are used. “Providing” identities from the outside seems quite different, even if we’re actually talking about infrastructure that supports individuals providing for themselves — which OpenID does.

So, food for re-thought.

Thanks to the good folks putting on the 2nd European Identity Conference, also known (and now tagged) as EIC2008, we  have VRM2008 starting in advance of it at the same location in Munich.

VRM2008 will take place on 21-22 April (all day Monday, and up until lunch at 1300 on Tuesday). EIC2008 will follow for the rest of 22 April and on through Friday, 25 April.

We also learned recently that ProjectVRM is one of three finalists for a Special Award to be given at the European Identity Award Ceremony on the evening of 22 April. I’ll be there for all of it. This includes a talk titled What Happens When the Users are Really In Charge, at 1030 on Wednesday 23 April. An interview with Dr. Christian Stöcker, SPIEGEL Online, will follow.

Here’s the deal. Anybody registering for VRM2008 will receive:

• a conference pass for VRM2008 (21-22 April)
• all EIC keynotes on 22nd April
• the evening event on 22nd April with buffet dinner, Bavarian beer and a great live band
• the Internet Scale Identity track sessions on 23rd April, which include the talk and interview listed above.

The event location, Forum am Deutschen Museum, is in the center of Munich.

Free registration is here.

I just learned by the Ajatus Manifesto that sixty-five percent of all CRM systems fail. Ajatus blames companies rushing to implement CRM. I’m sure that’s true. But I also think it’s possible that CRM itself is flawed by the closed and silo’d nature of the “relationships” involved. As a customer I can only relate to company CRM systems on the companies’ terms. Not on ones that I provide as well — for the good of us both. In other words, the base problem is that the lack of customer independence as a base condition for the relationship in the first place.

But I see here that Ajatus itself is a new CRM system for individual humans. Specifically,

Ajatus is a revolutionary CRM that runs as a local Ajax web application on your own computer. It uses the CouchDb object database for data storage and enjoys a wide range of plug-in and replication possibilities. With Ajatus you can keep track of your

• Notes
• Contacts
• Appointments
• Hour reports

…and as Ajatus is very extensible…

So it’s personal. That’s interesting.

It ’s also an open source project, which is cool. Here’s more from the prime author, Henri Bergius:

What makes Ajatus so special is the approach we’re taking with it. Having with OpenPsa found the traditional, hierarchical CRM approach unworkable we wanted to solve the problem in a different way:

• Local, rich AJAX client everybody can run on their laptop or internet tablet
• Replication to allow sharing data with partners, customers and the employer
• Simple base data types (note, event, contact, …) that users can customize and extend
• Possibility to build integration tools and plug-ins in almost any language (with CouchDb’s restful JSON interface)
• Speed

To help us stay on the right path we even wrote an Ajatus Manifesto to guide ourselves.

Currently the software already runs and does pretty much all the basic things needed. Once we get it into state where we can dogfood it (in interoperation with the company OpenPsa) we will make the first release. Until then, stay tuned, check the Git repository and join the talk!

Perhaps Hernri would be interested in joining ours as well.

Meanwhile, thanks to Zak Greant for pointing out the Ajatus Manifesto.

At ReplaceGoogle.com, Trey Tomeny outlines a very interesting approach to challenges such as personal health care data control (discussed over here). It’s a “private identity network” or PIN. Here’s what it does:

1. Provision our identity across the Internet so we don’t have to remember and enter countless user names, passwords, and captchas.
2. Filter our data both downstream and upstream so our surfing experience is less interrupted by undesirable intrusions.
3. Provide us with absolute anonymity at those sites that allow it
4. Provide us with convenient, repeatable pseudonymity at the sites that allow that
5. Certify our identity off line as enabled by off line partners
6. Provide single sign on to any device, anywhere
7. Provision our identity to access non-PC machines like locks and ticket acceptors
8. Provide a secure repository for our lifetime of data, while allowing limited access for limited purposes by parties we authorize
9. Provide a trusted way to manage intellectual property so creators and users are protected
10. Do all these things at no cost to the user.

I like where he’s going here, a lot; and I think it makes great fodder for discussion, as well as a challenge for developers. I hope Trey can make the next Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) in December, where folks doing good work on Identity already can bat it around, have fun with it, and maybe take it somewhere.

I also think it has the makings of a VRM system.  I only have two concerns, both minor.

One is that Trey positions the idea as a “replacement” for Google as “the dominant force” on the Net. I think this characterizes both the Net and Google too simplistically. That Google dominates search and advertising as both now stand is a Major Fact, but not cause for added characterization. I think Google could actually be of assistance here.

The other is that it proposes to replace or supplant the Google advertising model (and all advertising models, for that matter) with one that is more direct and efficient, as well as accountable. Regardless of the characterization, it would be make money on the sell side. I think there is much more, and better, money to be made by assisting the buy side in building an intention economy around actual buyer wants and needs. In VRM circles we talk often here about the need for “personal RFPs” or “fractional horsepower purchase orders”. By any name, this kind of thing, would, I think, be supported by Trey’s PINs.

Mary Hodder has weighed in on A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web, both on her own blog and then on her Dabble blog. After thinking about the bill, and the issues it raised, she wrote this (among other things):

Well after thinking it through, in different scenarios, and talking with people at the Data Sharing Summit over the weekend, and a couple of our advisors, I’ve decided that it makes more sense for users to:

1. own their data, solely
2. give a non-exclusive license to Dabble when they put data at our site.
3. be able to remove the data, to the extent that we can take it out (backup tapes are problematic but we’ll do our best)
4. part of the non-exclusive license to Dabble will include that we can distribute the data (RSS feeds, etc) about the user’s activities.

This is good, and I’m glad Mary did it, especially after standing by Dabble’s TOU (terms of use) and the notion of co-ownership of data in her first post.

Possession is nine tenths of the law, the swaying goes. Whether or not that’s the case (it isn’t, but so what), the vector of Mary’s choice pointed straight at the heart of VRM, which is independence. Owning one’s data is a way of assuring its independence from Flickr, FaceBook, MySpace and other social silos. It is essential that these outfits respect that independence. They thrive at our grace, not vice versa.

It’s also essential that we understand where independence originates: with the individual. Possession can make us crazy. (Walt Whitman’s poetry inveighed against “the mania of owning things”.) But we have the first person singular pronoun for a good and natural reason. If I share data with Dabble, it was mine first. Same goes with my photos on Flickr and my videos on YouTube. Even if I dedicate everything I create to the public domain, I am still the point of origination for those goods. My power to operate in the marketplace depends utterly on the ability to control what’s mine to begin with.

VRM is basically about two things. One is independence from vendors. The other is engaging with vendors. Both powers should originate and reside with individuals. We can’t relate only on vendors’ terms. We’ve been doing that for the duration. It’s ugly, it sucks, and we need to move past that. They can’t do the moving. We have to assert our own independence.

Speaking of which, I’m glad that Marc Canter is out there, whacking away at persistent cluelessness by companies old and new about What the Web Is and How Users Require Respect. Almost a generation ago, John Perry Barlow wrote A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, directing his case to the governments of the world. Today Marc takes the same basic message to the companies that host our online social networks, and even (to a growing degree) our online selves. I’m glad he does. We need that.

Authors of the bill are Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington. Kudos to all of them. (And sorry, I can’t make WordPress put the links in all those names. Not sure what’s going on there. It’s in the HTML I’m writing, anyway.)

In Competing Messages: Commerce and Sociality Dave Rogers says,

Commerce, at least as practiced in the west, is a competitive enterprise. There are winners and losers, some succeed while others fail. Every player seeks an advantage at all times. It’s a dynamic system, so strategies change and evolve over time, and the system presses against all boundaries in its efforts to find advantages to exploit. What presses back?

Well, government presses back, much to the dismay of libertarians. Government, presumably, has the public good as its central focus. We can debate whether or not that’s true some other time, but it’s true enough for the moment. As a result, we regulate businesses to establish boundaries against some efforts to seek a competitive advantage. These are most clearly observed in regulations governing public health and product safety.

Government is not a competitive enterprise. Politics is, but government is not. At least, not at the same scale that commerce is. Governments compete over longer spans of time, unless a war breaks out. But the Cold War is an example of competing governments. It didn’t take Microsoft a generation to defeat all other competitors in the OS wars. I hope the idea is clear. Technology changes this, but that’s a topic for another post.

But since politics controls government, and since politics is competitive, political figures are vulnerable to corruptive influences from commercial interests seeking economic advantages. Again, this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.

So again, what pushes back against commerce?

Very little, it turns out.

This is the point I tried to convey to Doc Searls in our telephone conversation, with no success. By trying to make commercial “messages” more “human,” by trying to make “commerce” more “social,” Doc and those who subscribe to his view cede the advantage to commercial interests at the expense of social ones. In my opinion, we need to start defending social and cultural boundaries against commercial efforts to gain a competitive advantage.

I don’t agree with Dave that commerce is purely competitive, and somehow zero-sum, requiring winners and losers. We’ve gone around on that, and I’m sure I won’t change his mind about it. But my point of view on “messages” is that they are by nature mostly bogus. I have not, for many years (since leaving the advertising and PR business long ago) advocated making “messages” more “social” or anything else.

What I’m trying to do with VRM is come at commerce from the customer side. To make substantive what Chris Locke meant when he wrote we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it. There is, implicit in that statement, and as a theoretical basis for The Cluetrain Manifesto, the assumption that the demand side has at least as much power as the supply side — power that the Net does not unleash, but does provide a means for expressing.

In fact, the power Dave talks about us ceding to commercial interests was lost long ago. VRM is about getting it back. But not by petitioning the powerful. Rather by engaging the powerful on fresh terms that are ours and not just theirs.